Posts

It’s been a walk down memory lane in the weblogging world for me lately. First I met Dave Winer this weekend, then I saw that Dan Hartung was back on the blogging scene on Sunday, and today I read that Jorn Barger has resurfaced. As a point of history, Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom Weblog was the origination of the term “weblog.” Peter Merholz (who I’ll probably run into at the grocery store in the next few days) came up with the term “blog.” And if you need proof of the “blog” coinage, check out this page in the Internet Archive. ...

I normally register my domain names through Dotster, but I keep hearing good things about GoDaddy.com, plus they’re cheap. I spotted a new domain name that I wanted, so I went and tried to register for it. After I picked the domain name, they immediately offered me an added cost option. I actually accepted it. Then they asked me if I wanted to see more offers. I agreed to do so, since it was my first time there, and man there were a bunch of them. I skipped over them all and went to the next page, which offered me one more thing. I declined, and was finally shown my shopping cart. I came to the site to register a domain name for $8.95. The shopping cart total was almost $50. They had gone ahead and signed me up to register the .net, .org, .info and maybe even more variants of my domain name. There were some other things as well. That’s when I closed my browser window. I can hardly stand it when I buy something at a store and they ask if I want the extended warranty, GoDaddy’s barrage of extras was just too much to take. ...

James Robertson has a good post explaining why outsourcing isn’t the end all and be all for business. Time zones are just one of the must fundamental obstacles: Sure, we can communicate just fine using all sorts of whizzy stuff on the net - so long as someone is willing to do it during non-business hours. That works fine if you have a project that requires minimal communication. I hate to break this news to Mr. Gottfredson, but software isn't one of those projects.

Here are some numbers that will astound you, courtesy of Nicholas Kristof: The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers' gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.

There was a big fad in the Java world urging developers to stop using JSP and instead use various templating languages in the view layer. The argument was that template languages force developers to stop putting business logic in the view layer, and that they’re easier for designers to learn. Ruby guy David Heinemeier Hansson presents a compelling argument that such languages are a waste of time. He blames unsuitable programming languages for giving rise to these templating languages, and I guess that’s probably true. I think the bigger problem is poor development practices. ...

Despite the moronic assertions of a certain segment of the blogosphere, Robert Fisk remains the essential reporter when it comes to Middle East issues. He happened to be in Beirut yesterday when former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated. He filed two stories: The killing of 'Mr Lebanon': Rafik Hariri assassinated in Beirut bomb blast Israeli spies, Syrian obsession and a peace that had to break

Design patterns are one of those topics that have eluded me throughout my career as a software engineer. I’ve made use of some patterns, like Model View Controller, Singleton, and Factory, but I’ve never studied them on any formal basis. I’ve seen the famous Design Patterns book on many a bookshelf, and have always fully intended to read it, but I can be cheap and lazy. This brings us to the book Head First Design Patterns, by Eric and Elisabeth Freeman. I had been eager to read a book from O’Reilly’s Head First series because the approach is so unusual, and because I figured that they must be good because producing books so heavy on illustrations is very expensive and time consuming. The authors were scheduled to do an interview on the Well, and I managed to score a free copy of the book so I could read it and participate in the discussion. ...

Anil Dash says nobody has ever been fired for blogging and a number of other smart things.

So my day job involves designing and building a Web service for use by customers. We started out by building a service designed to meet the needs of a particular client, but I immediately started working on something generic right after. I began by looking at the SOAP option, but I wound up building the service using HTTP POST and an XML document as the response (in what I guess would be called a REST approach). I abandoned SOAP because I was in a hurry and the toolkits looked hard to use and I was intimidated by interop issues. Anybody can formulate a regular HTTP request and parse an XML document. The upcoming question is whether to go back and build a SOAP interface as an alternative to the REST interface. Here’s a post from James Governor pointing out that developers just don’t care for SOAP, which certainly mirrors my own experience. Update: Karl Martino forwards a quote from an interview with Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield: ...

Looks like in the aftermath of this weekend’s Triangle blogging conference, there’s going to be a regular blogger meetup in Chapel Hill, Wednesdays at 6pm. Time and location are terrible for me (I live in Raleigh and the traffic between here and Chapel Hill is at its worst between 5 and 6), but I wish them luck. Now if someone wants to do the same thing in Raleigh, they should get in touch … Along these lines, there’s also the Triangle InterNetWorkers, who meet monthly, and a group of Triangle bloggers who meet for lunch roughly once a month, usually near RTP. (I don’t think there’s an easy-to-link Web page.) ...